Sri Lanka’s dry-zone villages are built around water. For more than two thousand years farmers here have linked small reservoirs into cascades, each tank feeding the next – a system the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization named a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System in 2018. This experience begins on one of those tanks, crossing by traditional oru outrigger, then walks the paddy bunds past a pela, the stilted hut where farmers still keep night watch for crop-raiding elephants. At the family home you help cook over firewood in clay pots: red rice, a curry from whatever the garden gave that day, kurakkan roti and freshly scraped coconut sambol. Lunch is served the village way, on a lotus leaf.